Kathleen Sebelius back to the Hill for more drubbings

Kathleen Sebelius isn’t going anywhere — but the White House isn’t exactly pulling out all the stops to defend her work.

That’s the reality of Sebelius’s uncomfortable status as she returns to the Hill on Wednesday to catch more arrows over Obamacare. The Health and Human Services secretary seems to have largely escaped the early GOP calls for her resignation over the website fiasco, and by most accounts she still has a good personal relationship with President Barack Obama.

Text Size

-

+

reset

6 major players in ACA debacle

But that doesn’t mean Sebelius, or HHS in general, are getting a lot of visible support from the rest of the White House. A damaging New York Times story reported that unnamed Sebelius aides had made fun of an Obamacare “countdown calendar” put together by White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, a leak that suggested the traditional tensions between the two camps have gotten even worse in the aftermath of the botched rollout.

And when Jeff Zients, the management consultant the White House recruited to head the website repair efforts, declared the fixes largely successful at the end of November, he suggested his team had discovered “weaknesses in how the project was being managed” — comments that were hard not to read as a slap at the oversight that took place under Sebelius, or at least on her watch.

Obama and his team have given Sebelius the obligatory statements of support when asked. White House spokesman Josh Earnest has said Obama has “complete confidence” in her, and Obama himself has said Sebelius did a “great job” under tough circumstances. But he didn’t take the bait when NBC’s Chuck Todd asked directly if he still has confidence in her — and he hasn’t offered morale-boosting shout-outs, at least at his public events, on the other days when Sebelius has defended the rollout on Capitol Hill.

And although the official line from the White House has always been that Obama and Sebelius are in lock step — they were both unsatisfied with the website and pushed for the fixes — even Obama has played a bit of the “not me” game, telling Chris Matthews that the failures had nothing to do with his own management style.

There’s a lot more to the story of the disastrous rollout, of course, including the management by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — the agency within HHS that’s heading the implementation — and the performance of CGI Federal, the main contractor on the website.

But Sebelius is the highest-profile figure, other than Obama himself, who had responsibility for implementing the law and getting it right. She’s already put herself through two grillings on Capitol Hill, and as she goes through her third one on Wednesday — before the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee — she’ll be in the awkward position of taking the hits for Obama but not getting a lot of confidence-bolstering statements from the White House in return.

And she’ll most likely have to answer Republican attacks on an ever-growing list of uncomfortable topics, from the canceled policies to “sticker shock” to the latest GOP theme — that people in certain situations won’t be able to keep their doctors, contrary to Obama’s promises.

Those who know Sebelius say she’ll just take the hits and not try to push back at the White House, even indirectly. Because that’s the tradition at HHS — you’re expected to be the fall guys for the White House, even if your view is that, yeah, they do share some of the blame.

“Part of everyone’s role, when you serve the president, is that you serve the president, whatever way that happens,” said one former HHS aide who worked under Sebelius. “I don’t see her engaging in anything other than moving ahead. She’s not going to throw up her hands and say the president botched the whole thing.”

Others say she’s politically savvy enough to take a hint if Obama does lose confidence in her — but that, until then, she’s so committed to the Affordable Care Act that she’ll ride out the criticisms.

“She’s done this for a long time. I really do think she understands how to play the game. That said, I think she’s completely committed to the success of the Affordable Care Act,” said Burdett Loomis, a political science professor at the University of Kansas who briefly worked for Sebelius when she was Kansas governor.

“She could have gotten out of the administration after four years and gone to a really good job, and said, ‘Good luck.’ But she did not do that,” Loomis said.

Sebelius’s current aides insist she’s focused on accomplishing the law’s goal of expanding coverage to millions of Americans and that she’s learned from growing up in a political family — especially from her father, former Ohio Gov. John Gilligan — to shrug off whatever criticisms come her way.

“Under her leadership, the site is now vastly improved from the beginning of October, and enrollment is far outpacing where it was in the initial weeks,” said a source close to Sebelius. “The secretary is used to the spotlight and to pressure. She learned early on from her father not to take criticisms personally.”